Ògbóni
From Myth to Physics
Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines
A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi
2
Part 6
Collage by myself evoking matter and energy transformations in the earth, in nature in general, in the human being and in machines, mediated through images of CERN ( the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research) research and Ògbóni, Yoruba esoteric order, iledi,Ògbóni sacred space ritual structure, all centered in the figure of Onile, Owner of earth and of Human habitation on earth, centre of Ògbóni veneration.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is a development of the philosophical and mystical potential of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni esoteric order. This effort is carried out by demonstrating intersections between Ògbóni cosmology, in its ritual activity, and scientific cosmology within the framework of its technological expression, particularly in particle physics, the study of the smallest constituents of matter.
These conjunctions are demonstrated in the context of relationships between an account of the ritual construction of the Ògbóni iledi, the order's sacred meeting house, and the activity of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Particle and Nuclear Research, both creativities described as contrastive ways of engaging with varied conceptions of energy.
This essay is a response to queries raised by Olayinka Agbetuyi, in the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, as a rejoinder to my article, "Ògbóni: From Myth to Physics : Yorùbá Esotericism at the Matrix of Disciplines: A Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi", which reacted to his engagement with my earlier essay published in the same group, "From a Horned, Naked Woman to Cosmological Physics and Explorations of Consciousness: Developing the Wisdom of the Yorùbá Origin Ògbóni Esoteric Order through its Multi-Cultural and Trans-Disciplinary Associations : A Voice from the Universal Ògbóni Fraternity".
Contents
Abstract
Ògbóni Goals and Methods
Ritual Use of Mythic Symbols
Correspondences and Differences Between Mythic and Mathematical Languages
Imaginative Significations: Material Form Evoking Energy Generation by Human Beings
Within Humanity's Terrestrial and Cosmic Contexts as Depicted in Ògbóni Ritual
Comparative Methodologies: Ògbóni Iledi Ritual as Paradigmatic of Humanity's Engagement with Energy
The Unknown Creative Factor Implicit in CERN Physics but Explicit in Ògbóni Myth : The Question of an Ultimate
Reality and Power
Ògbóni Goals and Methods
Ritual Use of Mythic Symbols
The Ògbóni iledi configuration represents a depiction of unifying principles of human existence, using concrete, physical, visual symbols drawn from nature.
These symbols are a means of abstraction from vast ranges of human experience. This abstraction depicts the universe as perceivable in terms of the human relationship with energy within the context of terrestrial existence, as framed by an intelligence and creative power behind the cosmos.
This cosmological framework is used as an interface between the human being and the creative forces they are working with. The proximate identity of these forces is the understanding of Ile, Earth, as a sentient entity whose presence is being concentrated, through ritual, at a spot of the iledi.
Ile is herself is likely to be perceived as an expression of àse, the cosmic power deriving from the creator of the universe and responsible for being and becoming, existence and change.
The Ògbóni symbols act as a means of focusing the intentions of the ritual agents. These visual forms are likely to be themselves represented through ritual speech meant to evoke the presence of Ile, Earth, understood as an expression of àse.
This evocational process would therefore proceed through the use of language calling forth the presence of the terrestrial mother. This process would be carried out in the belief that the conglomeration of Ògbóni images acts as a means of focusing the presence of Ile.
These images represent the complex of Earth and her intersection with humanity within the context of cosmic unity, an ultimate unity represented by Olorun, the creator of the universe symbolized by the immensity, breadth and luminous beauty of the sky.
This imagistic complex would be further represented through speech that guides the evocational process, almost like calling someone's name, inviting them to come to a particular place. The place, in this context, is where the ritual forms are buried:
Mother of we, charcoal burners feeding flames for food
Blood palpitating, bonding us in life and judgment
Between water and earth, between life and death, between matter and spirit
In the name of the ultimately immense one
Luminous as the sky yet beyond that great immensity
May your presence be known
In mystery and power, in darkness and light, in awe and illumination, majestic yet comforting
Ile! Alagbara! Powerful! Immovable!
Yet dynamic as the flowing stream and the crashing waves
Rhythms of ocean bottom, life teeming in silent depths.
Accept these humble gifts as we seek your presence.
So, the ritual speech, the incantation invoking, calling forth the presence of Ile, Earth, may go, at the spot where the ritual forms are buried, their presence resonating in the words of invocation.
Correspondences and Differences Between Mythic and Mathematical Languages
The Ògbóni mythic forms of charcoal, mud, chalk and camwood dust and mathematical symbols share the qualities of being imaginative and associative forms, in that they signify or refer to something different from themselves, providing a mental staircase to guide the human mind to understand what they are referring to.
The focus of mythic language, however, may be described as being in a combination of associative precision and evocative range.
It evokes both its proximate or readily induced associative values and an almost infinite range of evocative possibilities deriving from this associative foundation.
Mathematical symbolism, on the other hand, is directed only at associative precision, focusing on a specific referent to the exclusion of other possibilities.
Imaginative Significations: Material Form Evoking Energy Generation by Human Beings Within Humanity's Terrestrial
and Cosmic Contexts as Depicted in Ògbóni Ritual
The universe is represented according to material substances in the Ògbóni iledi symbol configuration representing Ile, Earth, understood as a sentient entity and the mother of all beings, the centre of Ògbóni veneration.
Within this structure-
Mud stands for earth.
Charcoal, for the human being. This human reference is underscored by the fact that in earlier times this charcoal was taken from the cooking fires of Ògbóni members.
Blood, for judgment.
Chalk, for Olorun, the creator of the universe.
Thus, this symbol configuration uses
Mud, in representing Earth, as universal mother.
In the spirit of maximizing the associative value of symbols, one may stretch this to include the entire material cosmos.
Blood, for judgment, which may be interpreted in terms of the Ògbóni relationship with blood, in the older contexts from which much scholarship on Ògbóni comes, in which blood, often animal blood, and in rare, particularly grave cases, human blood, is described as spilled in ritual, particularly rituals dealing with judgments involving oath taking (Peter Morton-Williams, "The Yorùbá Ogboni Cult in Oyo", 1960. 366, 370).
The focus in such contexts seems to be on the vitality of blood as embodying àse, a spiritual force which may be activated and directed through ritual.
Blood may thus be understood in this framework as evoking the bond between humans and between humans and earth, a bond intimately related to the normative and judicial processes through which society is sustained, enabling the civilizational value represented by communal existence.
Charcoal, for the human being.
Charcoal is a central means of energy in the low technology environment in which the Ògbóni symbols were developed. It is created by burning wood to generate heat energy, in the course of which it is transformed into charcoal.
In charcoal being described as standing for the human being, one may interpret this as suggesting human activity in relation to nature, specifically, transforming nature in generating energy for sustenance and warmth, as in earlier times.
This symbolism may be extended beyond such earlier periods to going beyond direct sustenance, as energy uses have expanded with technological growth.
Isaac Asimov sums up the strategic significance of fire, with particular reference to its early control by humanity through burning wood:
The whole civilization of mankind has been built upon finding new sources of energy and harnessing it in ever more efficient and sophisticated ways. In fact, the greatest single discovery in man's history involved methods for converting the chemical energy of a fuel such as wood into heat and light.
…
Fire provided man with a practically limitless supply of energy, which is why it is considered the greatest single human discovery-the one that hastened man's rise above the state of an animal.
( Guide to Science 1 : The Physical Sciences, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1979. 407) .
The 1992 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on fire reinforces these insights:
The step from the control of fire to its manufacture is great and required hundreds and thousands of years.
…fire has been essential at every stage of the growth of civilization during the succeeding 10,000 years.
…
Much of the modern increase of technology and science might be characterized as a continual increase in the amount of energy available through fire and brought under human control.
Most of the increased available energy has come from ever greater amounts and kinds of fires.
(Micropaedia, Vol. 4, 1992, 788, concisely but richly elaborated upon, though not quoted here, in Macropedia, Vol.18, subsection on "Mastery of Fire", p. 828 in the article "Evolution, Human,").
Comparative Methodologies: Ògbóni Iledi Ritual as Paradigmatic of Humanity's Engagement with Energy
CERN pursues its own goals by using massive machines that generate energy as they smash particles together in order to study the results as the particles break apart.
Ògbóni iledi ritual integrates symbols of humanity's relationship with energy within the human race's terrestrial and cosmological contexts, as a means of activating, through ritual, energy described as underlying all processes of existence, physical and mental, animate and inanimate, concrete and spiritual, an understanding of cosmic energy known as àse in Yorùbá.
The Ògbóni iledi ritual configuration may be seen as a symbolic summation of humanity's relationship with energy, in relation to the idea of an ultimate power.
In that light, it encapsulates the CERN system, the latter understood as a modern expression of a fundamental activity humanity has undergone since it discovered how to create fire, a primary form of energy.
The Unknown Creative Factor Implicit in CERN Physics but Explicit in Ògbóni Myth : The Question of an Ultimate Reality and Power
The Ògbóni ritual complex also depicts a subject that looms behind all human activity, particularly in its relationship with energy- does there exist an ultimate source to the dynamism of the cosmos, an ultimate energy source, perhaps directed by an ultimate intelligence, that enables the varied expressions of energy in the cosmos, enabling the cosmos exist and develop?
The Ògbóni iledi configuration represents an answer to this question in terms of the evocation of Olorun, the Yorùbá image of this ultimate power, represented in the Ògbóni ritual complex by chalk.
The CERN technological complex does not reference the question of an ultimate energy source, or its direction by a cosmic intelligence, but that question, as clarified by physicists from Aristotle to Isaac Newton to Paul Davies and others, is inescapable in all human activity, particularly the search for fundamental principles of the physical universe known as physics.
In relation to physics, the question can be framed as "is there an ultimate source to the creation and interaction between matter and energy within the context of space and time that is the province of physics?"
This question, implicit to physics or explicitly expressed by physicists and philosophers, incidentally responds to your enquiry :
Correlating the four elements of Ògbóni ritual : charcoal, camwood, earth and chalk with CERN's activity is not convincing. For instance where is the CERN equivalent of chalk [ representing] God in their strictly secular experiment?
Atheist physicists may conclude such an ultimate source of power and order does not exist. Agnostics may declare the idea of such a source is unnecessary to explain the cosmos. Others like astronomer Fred Holye may conclude along the lines of the Wikipedia essay on him, which provides links to the sources of the following account of his views:
"If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of..."
"The notion that not only the biopolymer [ complex structures produced by living organisms and making up much of their constitution -Encyclopedia Britannica online on "polymer" and Chemistry Leaner on biopolymer"] but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth[the dominant scientific understanding of the origin of life on Earth] is evidently nonsense of a high order."
Though Hoyle declared himself an atheist, this apparent suggestion of a guiding hand led him to the conclusion that "a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and ... there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."
He would go on to compare the random emergence of even the simplest cell without panspermia [ seeding of life on earth from space] to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein" and to compare the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes [ a subtle and complex mathematical puzzle] simultaneously.
Those who advocate the intelligent design (ID) belief sometimes cite Hoyle's work in this area to support the claim that the universe was fine tuned in order to allow intelligent life to be possible.
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